Missing Gary Tweddle Book Part 14 – CHAPTER 1: A LIMITED BACKSTORY

Gary was a new recruit at Oracle, new to Australia and wholly dependent upon his new employer Oracle Corporation Australia for his work, income, and welfare, like survival – everything.  Young Gary (at just 23) was beholden to Oracle.

May be this is how Oracle management preferred it, so they have a young keen naive lackey, achieve through magic (none by any training) with a short deadline to achieve
an arbitrary peak sales performance else face an expressed threat of crash and burn of the streets, ostracised, and fired.

So, for such an ‘intern’ to engender ‘anything goes’?

Young Gary, employed full time (likely on a standard 3 month probation to first prove himself) at his workplace at the time, would have been required by his employer Oracle to compulsorily attend its in-house sales force conference event at this isolated venue out of Sydney in the Blue Mountains.

So Gary did so. He had no choice.  But what was his state of mind (stress) at the time?
At this isolated conference venue at the Fairmont Resort in the Blue Mountains organised (and controlled) by his employer Oracle, what had Gary experienced during the Oracle sales conference Day 1 on Monday 15th July 2013, and then on Day 2 Tuesday 16th July 2013 after an Oracle corporate sales dinner, such to drive him to run out of the resort alone at midnight in freezing temperature wearing light clothing, with his mobile phone and forgetting his glasses?
High profit corporates demand high expectations of their sales force, which in turn imposes high pressure to perform or else be fired.  This is especially so by the multinational corporations on Sydney’s north shore like North Sydney, Artarmon, Chatswood and North Ryde (from this author’s own software consulting experience); and indeed in the finance district of The City in London, England.

Gary’s employer, Oracle Corporation, is a lead American multinational computer technology corporation and at the time in 2013 employed 122,000 staff globally, reporting an annual profit of US$10 million out of sales revenues of US$37 million.  This was on par with Oracle’s previous years, but performance was unsatisfactory in the mind of the sales driven culture of its founder and then CEO Larry Ellison, already a billionaire control freak.

Oracle Corporation’s founder, CEO and lead public front man, Larry Ellison.  Oracle is Larry’s alter-ego – Larry’s way or the highway?

Notably, media records at the time (2013) showed that Oracle’s sales results had been down of late:
‘Oracle posted a 2 percent drop in new software sales and Internet-based software subscriptions to $2.3 billion in its fiscal third quarter, missing its own forecasts and sending its shares sharply lower.’
SOURCE:  ‘Oracle sales down, stock falls‘, 2013-03-21, CRN Australia (technology

Worse though, was that Oracle’s global profit was down considerably and that this looked set to continue, and did:

Oracle has been renowned for its aggressive marketing and sales strategy as well as acquiring competitors to achieve market dominance.  This corporate culture has been driven by the ambitiously competitive personality of its founder in 1977 and then CEO Larry Ellison.

The comparatively shortfall from forecast sales was more of a chink to Larry’s ego and reputation than a devastating impact on Oracle’s successful global software business.

No growth perceived by Ellison as a sales performance was plummeting at the time

Oracle sales force was hard results driven under CEO Larry Ellison.  Former sales representatives have commented online of their experience working at Oracle:

  • “Oracle is very large and very driven in business. It is easy for employees to feel lost and to fight for survival anyhow they deem fit”
  • “their goal was to hire 22-year-olds right out of college and roughly half our salary.” 
  • “team morale is very low. Teams not hitting their numbers, especially on the SaaS side. Very high attrition rates and overall, cloud products not market ready. Internal processes are driving lots of internal conflict and frustration.”
  • “Oracle was a great job coming out of college, but even after repeated quarters of overachieving I was still micromanaged.” 
  • “worked hard and played hard. Very hard driving to meet objectives”. 
  • “Sales – Very stressful environment.”  
  • “Oracle is more focused on short-term quotas.” 
  • “It was a nice place to work many years ago, but now the company is a creepy greedy place. They have fired 60% of the team since Jul-20 up to date, but only to get more profit, as they opened a low cost support center in Mexico, and they are gradually firing the people working in the US. Usually you receive emails from the management requesting something, and also including something like “the directors are watching you”. The directors are also logged in to the chatroom so you can be careful about what you write. They also hear you phone conversations.”  
  • “Quickly to fire.”
  • “Greedy company. Management promote a culture of fear.”
  • “They’re bussing in college new hires by the thousands.” 

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Such was Gary’s new high pressure workplace market culture where the bottom line was everything.

Gary would have been one of those many IT college graduates at aged just 23 – keen, trying hard to please, young and naïve with immaturity to be able to cope with the demanding corporate sales target pressures and having little sales experience.  [Ed: Been there!]

So, Gary was likely out of his depth at such a powerful and controlling large male-dominated organisation trying to sell Oracle’s complex software systems to big companies.

Gary, being far from home on the other side of the world, would have in front of mind his sense of financial dependency upon his employer, Oracle.  His tenure in Oracle sales was wholly dependent on him delivering their new sales results week in, week out.

So Oracle owned Gary.  It would have been week-by-week performance survival.  He had nowhere else to go, save the prospect of being fired for poor performance and returning back to London as a failure.  May be his girlfriend knew or sensed this pressure in otherwise happy Gary.

Why discuss Gary’s employer culture?.  Read on.

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